


Digital vs Analog

by 221b_hound



Series: Captains of Industry [11]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - Hackers, Alternate Universe - Hipsters, BAMF John, Blood and Violence, Creepy Moriarty, Home Invasion, M/M, MOriarty is gross, Possessive Behavior, Possessive Moriarty, Stalker Jim Moriarty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-24
Updated: 2015-11-24
Packaged: 2018-05-03 06:11:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5279795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock's ignoring his hacker opponent, The Professor. The Professor responds by becoming a creepy stalker - rapidly escalating into dangerous creepy stalker. Sherlock is afraid for John's safety. He really should be worried for the stalker's.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Digital vs Analog

In the morning following their first night apart in three days, Sherlock swans through the just-ajar door of still-closed-to-the-public Captains of Industry, and past the servery window where the early shift staff are prepping the simple breakfast menu and Mrs Hudson is stirring batter with a will.

He drops his bag on a table, then sweeps right up to the coffee counter, behind which his boyfriend is seasoning the machine (whereby he pours and discards three shots from each group head). Before John can throw that swill into the sink, Sherlock jumps nimbly up onto the counter, down onto the other side, takes John’s face in his hands and plants on him an indecently passionate good morning kiss that is reciprocated in full.

This goes on for a bit, and then a bit more, and some more after that. The kitchen staff are staring (one of them starts his stopwatch) and Mrs Hudson is rolling her eyes and stirs the batter even harder.

‘Oh for fuck’s sake, you two,’ grumbles Violet from the kitchen.

Sherlock, who can multitask like a pro, pashes his boyfriend and gives Violet the finger at the same time.

‘Don’t forget to breathe!’ Violet calls out, amused, ‘And wash that counter down! I don’t want customers asking why there are footprints next to the cronuts!’

John grabs and squeezes Sherlock’s bum and turns his face to nuzzle Sherlock’s neck, puffing warm laughing breaths against his skin. ‘Missed you too,’ he says.

‘My place tonight,’ huffs Sherlock, ‘Or yours, I don’t mind.’

John kisses Sherlock again – it’s a process that takes further wonderful ages (or alternatively never long enough) no matter who initiates it. It’s only other people who feel the need to do things like time it (42 seconds for the first round).

Mrs Hudson flings a wet tea towel at them, but they only desist (37 seconds) when Greg Lestrade comes through the door and cheers.

‘This is more like it! Joined at the tonsils! And the Judges give you a score of…’ he imitates the sound of a drum roll and a cymbal clash, ‘TEN!’

Mycroft comes in behind him, and Greg wraps his boyfriend in a one-armed hug. ‘Remind you of anyone, gorgeous?’

Mycroft smiles complaisantly. ‘Our front door around half an hour ago.’

Greg grins and kisses Mycroft on the nose. ‘That’s my lovely fellow.’

John and Sherlock reluctantly part. Sherlock fetches his bag to sit by the window as usual. John cleans the counter next to the cronuts (blackberry and white chocolate ganache) under glass then returns to getting the espresso machine in tip-top shape for the morning.

‘You’re in early, Greg,’ John observes, ‘Don’t you old men have anything better to do than come and perve on young love?’

‘Course we do,’ says Greg, unlocking his studio, ‘We have Old Geezer love to get on with, as you heard. But we have a client this morning who has a midday flight, so we’re here to keep the customer satisfied, as opposed to each other, at least until lunchtime.’

‘Gregory, a moment,’ says Mycroft in a voice that is soft and utterly commanding. Greg grins and dashes into Mycroft’s studio for a brief discussion on fabrics and matching leather for the shoes, then a quick kiss, before going to his own studio.

*

Late in the morning, Sherlock is staring at his computer screen. He is so bored with it. With everything in it. With hacking. With security work which is more tedious every day. With The Professor (what a stupid name), who has stopped hacking businesses to get his attention and has started embedding messages in the hacker news sites just for him. Early last night it was, disturbingly, a photograph of Sherlock in his running gear, jogging through Flagstaff gardens.

He didn’t bring it up with John last night. It wasn’t in keeping with the mood, which was a mood of splendid mutual masturbation during phone sex, and then sleepy lassitude while listening to John snore faintly. A period of restlessness at around 3.30am indicated John was having a bad dream, so Sherlock had played his violin and John never even woke up before settling back into contented sleep.

Sherlock wonders if he should confess to John that he saw John’s reaction yesterday, when Violet broke all the glasses and for four seconds John was a soldier in Afghanistan. Sherlock wasn’t prying, it was just one of the many things that Sherlock sees, and Sherlock sees more and more about John every day, because he is always looking at John, wanting to know everything.

He wonders if he should talk to John about the second photograph, the one attached to an encrypted message received at 4am from a contact in Bulgaria, which was of John and Sherlock yesterday at Mr Burger. He thinks he probably should. It is certainly the kind of thing he’d want John to tell _him_ about. But he doesn’t want to worry John, either. The Professor is essentially having a tantrum about being ignored. It’s a bit alarming that he knows what Sherlock looks like, that he’s following Sherlock around Melbourne, but it’s not, you know, _dangerous_.

Sherlock checks his mail and decrypts an attachment that should be from a hacker contact in Thailand containing a few lines of code relating to a new virus out of China that he needs to unravel before it becomes a real threat.

What opens is something much worse.

What opens is a photograph of Sherlock’s front door.

That door was locked when he left this morning, with a tungsten steel lock held shut with combined pincode-fingerprint tech backed up by voice recognition software and a fucking _code word_. The door that is up a staircase from the door to the street, which needs its own fob to open as well.

Sherlock pinches wide the photograph of his impossibly open door, shifts it around, pinches it small again, deducing rapidly. It’s every bit as bad as he feared. It’s every bit as alarming.

That photograph was taken in the last twenty minutes, because the door was unblemished when he left the flat twenty minutes ago. It’s blemished now, all right. The photograph from Mr Burger has been printed out, torn in two and nailed to the door, and he’d have fucking _noticed_ that, whatever his rush to get to John.

The nail in the John-half of the torn image goes right through John’s face, which has already been defaced with red pen. The nail on the Sherlock-half goes through the top of the picture, but there’s a burn in the photograph. The left of Sherlock’s chest is a neat hole with sooty black edges, made with a hot cigarette.

Written underneath the mutilated pictures in red lipstick (Inika’s Auburn Ambition Vegan Lipstick, he notes – he did some work for their Carnegie office when he first moved to Melbourne) are the words **I MISS YOU.**

This is so Not Good that Sherlock doesn’t know where to begin.

He considers not telling John, and then he thinks that would be an appalling thing to do to a man who spent four seconds yesterday steeped in Afghanistan at the sound of breaking glass. He cannot possibly allow John to be taken by surprise by what might be a real threat.

The café is full. There’s a man getting a close shave in the barber chair, and another having his measurements taken by Mycroft while looking at the leather samples Greg is showing him. Some lone men are scattered among the tables, drinking coffee, messing about on tablets or phones. The Professor is a man, he thinks. He could be wrong, though a dozen little tells suggest it.

‘We have to talk,’ Sherlock says forcefully when John brings him a pre-lunch coffee a moment later, ‘It’s urgent.’

John doesn’t hesitate. He takes Sherlock into the office, with a curt wave to Mrs Hudson. Everyone’s coffee can go hang, apparently, because Sherlock has said so.

Sherlock loves John Watson so much and is suddenly so afraid he thinks he may combust. Strangely, he’s not afraid that this is the thing that will make John leave. He is afraid, and enraged, that someone might mean to harm John. That The Professor means harm to him, too, does occur to Sherlock, but doesn’t seem important.

Sherlock shows John the pictures on the door. He explains how his security system has been hacked, and by whom. He says, ‘I’m sorry. I had no idea he was a lunatic of this magnitude. He was a hacker rival. That was all, and now… John. I’m calling the police and heading home. Stay here, and be careful. I don’t know what he looks like.’

‘You are not going home without me,’ says John firmly. He strides out of the office, shouts out to Mrs Hudson: ‘Sorry, Mrs H. Sherlock’s place has been robbed by some fucked-up tool. We have to go.’

Mrs Hudson gestures for Violet to take over the espresso machine. Greg and Mycroft, whose customer is leaving for the plane he’s meant to catch, begin to follow. Sherlock is already on the phone, calling the police to meet him at the flat.

John’s expression is grim. So is Mycroft’s, and that’s when Greg knows how serious this is. He can see Mycroft knows this is not just a burglary.

‘I’ll come with you,’ offers Mycroft.

‘I have John,’ says Sherlock.

Mycroft gives John a penetrating look – it might be accusing him of something, or asking for something. John nods. ‘I’ll take care of him,’ he says. Mycroft nods back.

Sherlock hears the exchange, and he’d be annoyed except that he’s glad. _John will take care of me._ That sounds like a something to be held onto forever. _And I will take care of John_ is the promise he makes silently back.

*

A policeman named Dimmock meets them at Sherlock’s flat. The defiled picture is still nailed to the door.

At first glance, the flat appears pristine. Nothing has been stolen. The violin is untouched, thank god.

In the middle of the living room, however, is a puddle of urine.

Sherlock narrows his eyes as he looks at it.

‘Marking his territory,’ Sherlock says, ‘He has left everything untouched. He considers it his. He considers me… his.’

John is very still. John is very quiet. John looks like a mild-mannered bomb with a laser targeting system and a motion-detector detonation trigger.

Sherlock is suddenly a lot less concerned about John’s safety, and a lot more gleefully certain that The Professor has made a very bad mistake.

Probably he shouldn’t be so thrilled about that, but he is. _Thrilled_. To the back teeth. If he falls any more in love with John Watson, he’s going to come out in a rash made of love-hearts and erections.

‘We’ll need to dust for prints, take a sample of the piss…’ begins Dimmock.

‘There won’t be any prints,’ says Sherlock. He crouches and sniffs the puddle – to Dimmock’s disgust, and John’s evident curiosity. Then Sherlock rises and inspects his ruined front door. He uses a pen to lift the two halves of the picture and looks at the back of them. He draws a square magnifier from his pocket and flips it open to examine the door, the nails, the corridor floor.

He examines the entry into the flat. He follows some unseen marks to the bedroom and pulls back the doona.

The bastard hasn’t pissed in the bed, but he has placed a raw steak, cut into the shape of a loveheart, in the centre of it.

Dimmock is on the phone to forensics.

Sherlock checks his fridge.

There is a pig’s head in his fridge. One a wire baking rack.

Sherlock reaches for it and suddenly John’s hand is around his wrist, clamped tight, holding him still.

‘No.’

Sherlock does not fight his hold. ‘What has he done?’

‘There’s a wire,’ says John, pointing, and Sherlock can see it now. Fishing line made dull with powder – talc or flour. John crouches down and peers underneath the plate. Sherlock follows and looks at it. There seems to be a bag of red fluid in the pig’s mouth.

A bag of blood.

It’s harmless, really, but gruesome.

The wire is wound around the pig’s head, the rack and into the hinge of the fridge door in such a way that once the head on its baking rack is removed, the tension in the wire will cause the brittle wax cap (around which it is also wrapped) of the bag of blood to crack free. A weight above it (it might be a large magnet, it’s hard to see) will collapse and blood – probably pig’s blood – will vomit everywhere out of the dead pig’s open mouth.

Sherlock is acutely aware of John’s background which led him to even look for, let alone recognise, a booby trap in his fridge.

‘Still think he’s just marking his territory?’ asks Dimmock.

‘That’s exactly what he’s doing,’ says Sherlock sharply, and suddenly he is rattling off observations, hardly stopping for breath.

‘He’s not particularly tall, by Australian standards. One hundred and seventy two or three centimetres, judging by the height of the pictures on the door. He nailed the first one lower down, then realised it indicated his height and moved it up before affixing the second one. There’s also the angle from which he took that photo and the one of me running in Flagstaff. He is shorter than I am by a good ten centimetres, though a little taller than John. Impressions in the corridor and the hallway indicate he wore runners, Adidas tread, for a small foot – size six men’s. He’s left-handed – see the knots on the fishing wire, and the way he cut the heart from the steak. He has dark hair – there are strands where he left his mark on my floor. Of course they’re not mine.’ He plucks a strand from his own head, ‘Mine would either have product to hold it straight or a natural curl, these ones are shorter with very little product. He consumes Vitamin B tablets to excess – he pees fluoro yellow-green. There’s a distinctive sweet odour associated with fenugreek, as well, so I imagine he’s a health food nut or inordinately fond of south Indian cuisine. He is health conscious, but not used to a great deal of activity – he perspired freely on the doorstep.’

‘Could have been nervous,’ offers Dimmock.

‘A nervous man does not set up a blood bag booby trap in a severed pig’s head without setting it off. No, he waited to set that until he’d caught his breath. But he was in a hurry – ran up the stairs to my door as I was leaving, slipping in while the downstairs door was ajar or he would never have got in without being observed. Disarming the front security panel would have taken a moment, and although Guildford Lane seems quiet, at that time of the morning there are plenty of tenants in the area heading out to work. Once at my own door, he used specialised equipment to override the security panel – something fairly simple for a hacker of his experience – but he perspired freely on the front mat from the exertion of sprinting to the door before it closed.’

‘Plenty to get going with, anyway,’ concedes Dimmock.

‘That,’ says John, gazing on Sherlock with undisguised adoration, ‘Was amazing. You are amazing. And if he tries to touch you, I’m going to break every bone in his fucking body, starting with his fucking face. If you don’t mind.’

‘I don’t mind,’ says Sherlock, who is in fact charmed.

‘I’m not…’ says John, stumbling suddenly, ‘It’s not about being possessive. You don’t belong to me, I know that.’

Every line of John’s body is strung tight with a cry of denial. Under the circumstances, John is anxious that Sherlock not think that John is possessive; to not think that John is territorial about him. Not like this mad bastard The Professor.

Sherlock leans close to John and whispers in his ear. ‘I belong to you,’ he says softly, ‘You belong to me.’

John instantly relaxes. Not _relaxed_ , relaxed, but he is no longer anxious, only alert.

‘You’ll stay with me tonight, yeah?’ says John.

‘Of course.’

*

It takes a few hours for the police team to go over Sherlock’s flat. They disarm the blood bomb, take samples of urine, hair, sweat. They bag the nails and the photographs and the steak heart and the pig’s head and fishing line. They search for other booby traps and nasty surprises, find none. They dust for prints and find none of those either.

While they are working, John calls Mycroft to give him a precis. Sherlock deigns to take the phone and his exchange with his brother is simple.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Of course I’m all right.’

Sherlock hands the phone back to John and John says, ‘I’ll make sure he is.’

Everyone seems happy with that.

When they’re done, John helps Sherlock clean the flat. A locksmith provides a temporary physical lock for the door and near 8pm they go to North Melbourne.

They strip and stand in John’s shower for a long time, washing each other with soap, scented gel, clean flannels, sluicing off the stink of that bastard and what he’s done.

They retire to John’s room, where he fires a series of texts off to Irene. _Sherlock has a stalker. Sherlock’s staying with me tonight. Police are on it. Watch yourself anyway, yeah?_

Irene replies. _Staying with my girlfriend. Prance naked around the house if you want. But no sex in the common areas._

John and Sherlock stretch out on John’s bed, then John spreads Sherlock across the sheets and makes him slick and warm with licking, with sucking, with lube, and rocks into his body, unhurried. He murmurs sweet things to Sherlock and fucks into him, languid and confident, his hands gentle and steady. Sherlock feels owned and safe and when John comes, Sherlock wraps arms and legs around him to hold him close. _Mine mine mine._ Then John sucks Sherlock off, making a point of brushing his moustache all along Sherlock’s sensitive length whenever he’s not sucking, which Sherlock absolutely fucking loves, and Sherlock chants John’s name in a dozen different cadences until he’s a quivering mess, and when he’s inarticulate and whimpering with pleasure, John deep throats him and Sherlock comes.

While John is kissing him to calmness afterwards, John’s phone pips.

It’s a voice message.

_I hear you’re having a great old time. With my property._

Sherlock’s eyes grow wide with alarm, and wider still when John climbs off the bed and pulls on a pair of jeans, his expression cold.

‘Call the cops,’ John says, ‘Use your phone.’

Sherlock does exactly that while John picks up his own phone.

‘Do you trust me?’ John asks.

‘Yes.’ Unhesitating.

‘Seriously, Sherlock. I may be about to do something a bit stupid. If you’d rather wait for the cops, we’ll wait.’

‘I trust you,’ says Sherlock again, his voice ringing with conviction.

‘Tell Dimmock what’s going on then, and then stay here. I’m going to see to this prick.’

Sherlock is still on the phone with Dimmock as John turns off all the internal lights, strides to the front door, flings it wide and steps onto the narrow front porch without turning on the outside light.

John holds his phone up to the night, high above his head, just below the fancy iron lacework across the eaves. Ghostly shadows flicker through the faint artificial light of the screen.

‘You want him, you fucker, you can try to get him.’

Someone laughs, close by.

A normal person would be freaked out. They’d be frightened by the laughing lunatic not three metres away out there in the dark. A normal person would lock themselves in the house and wait for the police.

John is not that person.

John, until a moment ago faintly illuminated by the light of his phone held overhead, has seen by that same light the small figure crouched in the bushes in the front of the house two doors down. John has excellent eyesight.

John wasn’t only a frontline med tech in Afghanistan. He was other things too.

John steps swiftly into the house, killing the light of the phone as he does so.

On his bare feet, he pads silently down the corridor. He reaches his open bedroom door. Sherlock is lying on the floor, keeping a _sotto voce_ commentary up for Dimmock. At John’s signal, he falls silent and mutes the phone. He uses his iPad to start a facetime talk with Dimmock then reverses the camera so it records the movement in the hall.

The recorder hears and then sees the small, slender figure creeping through the darkness with something in his hand. It looks like a gun.

Sherlock’s heart begins to pound.

‘Give me back my playmate,’ says the stalker in a voice that’s dark and sticky like fresh-poured asphalt, ‘Or I will destroy you, you upstart fucking glorified waiter. With your stupid fucking moustache and your wanky suits. I will hack every piece of tech you own. I will use your identity to ruin your credit record. I’ll flood your social media with racist propaganda. I’ll buy child porn in your name and dob you in to the coppers. I… Oh, there you are. My little darling.’ He has caught sight of the faint reflection of the screen on Sherlock’s face.

‘Here I am,’ agrees Sherlock calmly, despite his pounding heart. His night sight is not as good as John’s, but he knows he’s seen that silhouette before.

 _Molly’s client today_ , he realises. _Close shave. Fringe trim. She didn’t like shaving him. Said after he was a cold fish. Should have paid attention._

‘You stopped playing with me,’ says the creepy cold fish.

‘You bore me,’ says Sherlock, sounding very bored indeed. ‘You only do the one trick. It’s a neat hacker version of a triple somersault with a triple reverse twist, but even that gets tedious after the third time.’

The Professor takes a step across the threshold towards Sherlock, snarling, ‘I will fucking _own_ y-‘

A door in the face effectively cuts that threat short.

It’s not a polite door in the face, no.

It’s a sharp, hard smack of a heavy door slammed against the intruder’s face, once – a crack of cartilage followed by blood gushing from his nose – then twice – a squishier sound, almost inaudible under the howl of pain and the clunk of the door banging into his forehead – then a third time, with a higher crack of the door connecting with the fucker’s teeth.

John flings the door aside and drops onto their intruder – one knee to the diaphragm, one pinning down his left arm. The bastard’s other arm is pinned over his head with a vicious grip on his wrist.

Before John has to ask, Sherlock has switched on the lights. He has left the iPad propped on the bedside table so it’s still sending images to Dimmock, who is on his way with a couple of cars.

‘Drop the gun,’ says John calmly, like he’s asking the time. He leans his knee into his prisoner’s diaphragm and, wheezing, the intruder drops the gun.

Sherlock nudges it out of the way with his foot. John can see now it’s not a real gun. Some kind of cigarette lighter, he thinks.

Sherlock has pulled on a pair of John’s pyjama pants that are too short on him. He is grinning like a love-addled loon at John. John grins like a love-addled loon right back.

The Professor is scowling. He is a small, slight man. His face his covered in blood. His nose is broken, his two front teeth are broken, his face is swelling already. He spits blood at John. John pulls back in distaste and the bloody gob misses him and falls back on The Professor’s chest.

‘Can you get me a bag of peas, Sherlock?’ John asks.

At this point, John could ask Sherlock to fetch a top hat and cane and dance an improvised routine in the nude to a Whitlams song and Sherlock would be completely on board with that. The peas are a piece of piss.

John isn’t gentle with the first aid, but he gives it. The little shit is menace enough when it comes to tech, but the physical world is another matter, and he lies on the floor whining about the pain and swearing ineffectually until the police and ambulance come and take him away.

‘You acted in self-defence,’ Dimmock assures them, ‘Witnessed by the police. There won’t be any charges.’

‘He’ll live,’ says John, ‘Set his nose right and a proper dentist, you won’t even be able to tell in a few months.’ A face broken by a door is nothing, in his experience. No bullets involved is practically a luxury.

When they have the house to themselves again, Sherlock texts Mycroft.

_John got the bastard. John 10; Bastard Nil. ;)_

Then Sherlock sits on John’s lap on the bed and covers John’s face and throat and shoulders with kisses.

He pauses between kisses to say, ‘He was one of the best hackers I ever encountered.’

‘Not as good as you, though.’

‘No. Not as good as me.’

‘Geniuses of the digital world.’ John grins, dazzled; dazzling, ‘Sometimes analog’s better though.’

‘Yes,’ breathes Sherlock, and proceeds to be supremely analog with his tongue, all over John’s body. And John pants and arches and submits and both of them are thinking: _mine mine mine._

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> For the record, he'll probably dance to [ 'You Sound Like Louis Burdett'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaQlVvzDYiw), with an encore of ['Thank You (For Loving Me At My Worst)'.](https://youtu.be/gG33Vn9X320)


End file.
